“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry (and VSP picking) hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him (Voeckler, really, fourth place?), as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; (huh?) as one who in that miserable plight still…
It used to be that you could choose any color shoes you wanted, so long as they were black and any color socks, so long as they were white. Easy times, those. Then Gianni gave me his White Ladies and all of a sudden my life was complicated. First of all, the shoes were so beautifully white in…
When it comes to hardmen, there aren’t many tougher than this guy. That he manages to mix massive amounts of V with similarly massive amounts of Casual Deliberation only serves to heighten the man-crushes of a bunch of older, fatter, balder men who see a visage of Spatacus looking back at us in the mirror every time…
Three days in, and it’s already been a brutal opening week of the Tour. I’ve never heard of the Tour neutralizing part of the stage unless a Schleck was involved, but I was relieved to understand that the reason for the neutralization had more to do with how many doctors were available for the second…
The conundrum for the Cyclist (but not the bike rider) presents itself daily. We try to keep ourselves safe every time we get on our bikes, and we want to achieve a balance between form and function. Sometimes function wins, though mostly it’s form with the upper hand. A YJA isn’t going to protect you…
The Tour de France is France’s race. Actually, that isn’t quite fair. The Tour de France is France’s Olympics, World Cup, and National Identity all wrapped up into one big sweaty peloton of hopefuls. My first trip to France to watch the Tour in 2003 (I’d ridden there many, many times before, but never to…
My bike weighs about 6 kilos. It is no waify little thing either, with it having a 61cm frame and and three stories of seatpost. It has beefy tubes, a stiff bottom bracket and steerer, and deep section wheels which are laced 3x in the back and 2x in front. This bike has never made me go faster;…
If Gatorade had any marketing sense whatsoever, they would have plastered photos of this pair all over every billboard in Europe.
I pump my tires up every single day, and every day it is the only part of Cycling I don’t like. The act of pumping while holding the pump in place is itself a bit of a bummer, especially if you are trying to do it in your Cycling shoes because your brain is too small to…
We are bipedal creatures. Fact. Bipedal locomotion sucks. Also a fact. This makes being a human somewhat challenging in the sense that we don’t have opposable toes or a tail with which to swing from tree limbs. Swinging from your tail seems a little bit like bliss, if you ignore the associated demotion back into the Food Chain….
Words of advice for the lads: If your girlfriend is a very good cyclist and you two are going to get engaged, a nice racing bike is not a substitute for a ring. I tried it. In my cyclo-centric male brain, she needed a proper racing bike a lot more than she needed a ring….
The wheel has always fascinated me, and why wouldn’t it? It’s one of the oldest known inventions, with the earliest archeological example believed to be about 5500 years old. They get us from point A to point B every day, one way or another. Without the wheel, we’d be reduced to walking. It’s not natural….
In the 1989 Tour de France, Laurent Fignon was on the rivet. Close to collapse. But his Directeur Sportif noticed that Greg LeMond’s shoulders were rocking; he knew from the time he spent coaching Greg that this was the telltale sign of his imminent collapse. He ordered Fignon to attack, and he took the Yellow Jersey. He could…
Where would cycling be without the malted recovery beverage? Does El Pistolero crush a few pints after the Giro? A cold Spanish white wine just does not do it. That notion makes me angry just thinking about it. A good beer in a proper glass; it’s like a clean chain whizzing through the drivetrain, magic….
Whenever something tries to be something it isn’t, you wind up getting into trouble. Those Cutlass Cruisers in the 70’s and 80’s with vinyl wood panelling weren’t fooling anyone. Neither are those linoleum tiles in my kitchen; not one person in history has ever mistaken them for being marble. And Lycra has never tricked anyone into believing…
The Giro ended on Sunday in Milano. Three weeks of Italian immersion have been completely worthwhile. I knew May was going to go this way but a DVR that dutifully records hours of racing every day…I’m only human. Italian TV does a fantastic job covering each stage. The Giro becomes a travel log of the…
I rode with a rider I know from work a few weeks ago. The first time we sat in a meeting together, we immediately pegged one another as a Cyclist the way Cyclists always peg one another; nothing specific or obvious but everything nonspecific and nonobvious. It’s what we do, you can’t learn it and it can’t be…
We are a sick lot. We have no morals whatsoever. I understand why others are wary of us, why café patrons reel in disgust, why real men driving utes want us dead. We attempt to assimilate while at the same time exhibiting no shame of our middle-aged bodies swathed in a thin shield of no real protection (for us or…
I genuinely miss the eighties. Funny Bikes, which I say without thinking this though. Then again, time trial bikes today are basically road bikes with a position for tuned for “more speed”. In other words, switching to your TT bike today is like switching from your road bike to a slightly less comfortable road bike, with your…
@lanternerouge has been kind enough to go into the V-cave for the betterment of all, and write about it. Eating and riding, they don’t mix well; the harder you ride, the less you can eat. No one is hungry when chewing on their bar tape but the Man with the Hammer has no remorse. He…